Abstract:

University curricula consist of compulsory and elective courses. Compulsory courses are mandatory classes required to fulfill degree requirements, ensuring essential, foundational knowledge in a specific field. Elective courses are optional, student-selected classes that allow students to tailor their studies, explore interests and develop skills outside the core curriculum. Electives offer flexibility in building credits toward a degree and are often related to majors which are specialized fields of study that define students' academic focus and degree path. An elective plan involves selecting non-compulsory, optional courses that allow students to tailor their degree to personal interests, career goals or to gain a more well-rounded education and typically makes up a specific percentage of the total credits required for graduation.

As part of a recent broad reform of the curriculum of our department of computer engineering and informatics six majors were induced associated with particular electives. As a result, students are required to select a major-oriented set of electives covering the seventh, eighth and ninth semesters of their 5-year studies according to three predefined scenaria so that several particular conditions are met. Following this procedure, students must come up with an elective plan containing 17 electives after completing their sixth semester of studies. However, majors having overlaps due to shared eligible electives and rules imposed by the available selection scenaria increase the complexity of creating valid and meaningful elective plans. Thus, students experience confusion and stress while it is hard for administrative personnel to address multiple student requests for check and validation of individual elective plans. Moreover, currently check and validation of elective plans can only be performed manually since no relevant application is available.

Motivated by these observations, with an intention to support students and administrative personnel and thus contribute to the successful implementation of the recent curriculum reform at our department, we designed and implemented a platform which enables students to create their own major-oriented elective plans either from scratch or based on automatically generated recommendations. Our platform, named CeidCoursePilot, provides students with complete information on courses and majors, personalized and customizable recommendations for elective plans tailored to match their profile and objectives as well as functionalities for creation and validation of elective plans which can be further saved on a list of favorites or downloaded. Our CeidCoursePilot platform also provides a complete administrative environment where via a rich well-organized dashboard designated administrators can manage all available data on courses, majors, templates for elective plans, scenario rules and registered users. Administrators also have access to various analytics including popularity of majors, courses and scenaria as well as to quantitative and qualitative information on visitors and elective plans, which could be further exploited for evaluation of the recent reforms and implementation of corrective actions, if needed.

Our platform is a responsive application and supports accessibility features while it is currently available in greek and english. It has been developed using mainly Next.js, React and Typescript while it is deployed and hosted on the cloud platform Vercel.

Keywords:

Major-oriented elective plans, major-based curriculum, recommendation system, online platform, Next.js, React, Typescript, Vercel.